Best-ever special effects

Forget big budget CGI - these are the best Hollywood effects

By
Holly Sands
22 August 2011

With Eid-al-Fitr on the horizon, the city’s cinemas will be unleashing a cascade of blockbusters after a month of relatively obscure releases. As we await the daring action sequences in next week’s Captain America, impressive CGI in Rise of the Planet of the Apes on September 8 and clash of genres in Cowboys and Aliens on September 15, we look at cinema history’s most impressive special effects.

5 King Kong (1933)Question: How do you make audiences care about a giant, enraged ape that’s marauding around New York City? Answer: You get Willis O’Brien to bring him to life. The stop-motion animator turned the four Kong models – notably the 24-inch one used for the Gotham scenes – into objects with as much personality as the film’s human protagonists. When you watch Kong, you don’t see a concoction of rabbit fur, foam rubber, aluminium and latex; you see a creature capable of sorrow, anger, chivalry, curiosity and, yes, love. O’Brien’s work here inspired a generation of future FX artists, though the pioneering animator never topped the heights he reached with Kong – nor, for that matter, has anyone else. DF

4 Alien (1979)Is this the most shocking effect of all time? Creature features had always relied on monsters, teeth and buckets of blood, but never before had the scare sprung from a major character’s pregnant body – all the more terrible for being a man’s (poor John Hurt). Conceptually, the idea was explosive, scorching terrain. Turning it into reality was the job of morbid Swiss artist HR Giger, who designed the ‘chest-burster’ prop, along with adult versions of the alien. The stick-mounted puppet was then anchored in a prosthetic torso filled with pressurised squibs. Hurt was partially hidden under the table. The other actors were kept in the dark about what was going happen; those shrieks are real. JR

3 An American Werewolf In London (1981)Transformations are probably the first goal of any aspiring make-up artist hoping to scare up a reputation. No werewolf, though, has enjoyed as loving a birth as the one designed by Rick Baker for John Landis’s well-received horror-comedy. Bristly hairs sprout through foam-moulded skin, snout and paws elongate via ingenious robotic propwork and, most troublingly, vertebrae realign with a sickening thunk. Tempting disaster, the whole sequence takes place in a well-lit living room, allowing for zero departure from realism. Viewers were stunned and the Oscars had to take note, creating an entire category, Best Make-up, for Baker to win. JR

2 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)Its tagline promised ‘the ultimate trip,’ and thanks to an amazing interstellar-overdrive finale, Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi opus kept its word. Viewers are treated to a hyperspace ride through pulsing lights, swirling nebulae and cosmic debris that was unlike anything seen on screen before. Award-winning special-effects maestro Douglas Trumbull utilised a slew of techniques to achieve this stunning sequence, from the low-tech (dropping paint into black water) to the advanced (shooting slit-scan images inside rotating drums). Though 2001… contains a host of other FX innovations (Kubrick’s use of front projection; those miniature spaceships), it’s Trumbull’s ‘Star Gate’ climax that remains the movie’s mind-blowing pinnacle. David Fear

1 A Trip To The Moon (1902)We go way back – more than a century – to reach to the pinnacle of special effects: the first science-fiction film (pictured above). Any attention we can throw to Georges Méliès’s 14-minute silent flick, a masterly bonbon of mysterious loveliness, we will (Martin Scorsese will be doing his part to right the historical record in this fall’s Hugo, a kids’ adventure rooted in the real-life story of Méliès). The filmmaker’s pioneering effects included double exposure, forced perspective seemingly spanning thousands of miles, and dreamlike prop work. You can YouTube it; go in with an open mind. The vibe isn’t realism, but rather the giddy kick of an unhinged bedtime story. Which is exactly what the best special effects do: turn us, once again, into agog children. Joshua Rothkopf